SOCIETY STATEMENT

SVP'S OFFICIAL RESPOSNE LETTER TO NSF ON THE CBSR HIATUS
26 March 2016

To Whom It May Concern:

The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP), a research-focused professional organization with more than 2500 members, urges you not only to continue the Collections in the Service of Biological Research program (CBSR), but to increase its share of funding and to expand the scope of collections to which it applies.

CSBR provides valuable support for research in vertebrate paleontology. Our field, which is among the most productive within evolutionary biology, depends on data collected from specimens that are placed into repositories. Not only the primary evidence for vertebrate life in the past comes from fossils, many of the fundamental scientific questions of our time are addressed with vertebrate fossils. Does climate change cause extinction? How, why, when, and where, did humans originate? How were genetic and developmental processes involved in the origin of body parts, such as limbs? Repositories serve as venues for making new discoveries accessible to the scientific community as well as sources for collecting new data from specimens generated by past field projects. The value of vertebrate fossils to current research is demonstrated by the fact that 15 papers based on them have already been published in Nature and Science in the just the first three months of 2016 (see Appendix 1). Consider for example, the one Lyons et al. (2016) titled “Holocene shifts in the assembly of plant and animal communities implicate human impacts”. Based on literally tens of thousands of fossil specimens housed in hundreds of repositories, many of which were collected decades or even centuries ago, they concluded that human impacts on ecological community structure is fundamentally different than the ecological processes that have operated over the last 300 million years of Earth history. By supporting specimen repositories, CSBR helps provide the data infrastructure for research in our field.

By funding institutions with repositories, CSBR supports vertebrate paleontology everywhere. Our data come from visits to repositories, loans we receive from them, and new specimens we accession into them. Institutional repositories thus provide infrastructural support for researchers outside their institution, and thus deserve financial support from the scientific community. The funds and institutional commitment needed to maintain repositories are not trivial. Vertebrate fossils are rare – often one of a kind – laborious to collect, easily damaged, and increasingly prized by private collectors. Repositories must protect specimens from theft, prevent them from being damaged, ameliorate damage that has already been done, store them in a way that prevents them from degrading, and anticipate the ways in which new data may be collected in the future so as not to pre-emptively destroy the possibilities opened by new technology. Furthermore, repositories must disseminate inventories to the scientific community, accommodate visitors, process loan requests, and provide data. The costs of these services are the responsibility of the institutions that house them, not the researchers who benefit from them. Therefore, CSBR provides critical funding for researchers by supporting the infrastructure on which the community depends.

By funding repositories, CSBR aids professional and ethical practices in science. The SVP’s code of ethics requires its members to place vertebrate fossils into stable, long-term public repositories. Similarly, the National Science Foundation, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Agriculture, and regulatory bodies in many states require that fossils collected with public funding or from public lands be placed into accessible repositories. Reputable scientific journals, like PLoS ONE, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Evolution, and Palaeontology, with high ethical standards require that all specimens discussed in manuscripts must be housed in public research repositories. Therefore, the lack of funding for specimen repositories will undoubtedly hamper the advancement of synthetic research, especially since the acquisition of important new collections often require external funds like those provided by CSBR.

Funding from CSBR can also be rhetorically important within institutions for the allocation of local budgets. Most of the financial support for repositories is provided by institutions themselves, but formulas for allocation of resources within universities and public-sector research institutions is often based on success in securing external funds. Grants from CSBR often serve as important evidence that the repository deserves internal funding, even though only a small amount of support actually comes from National Science Foundation. Discontinuing CSBR funding may therefore lead to loss of internal funding and thus have the indirect effect of placing critical scientific data and research output in double jeopardy.

Examples of how CSBR funding has been important to paleontological research and training abound. In reviewing NSF support to paleontological repositories, we found 67 grants since 1993 totalling more than $20 million (see Appendix 2). Thanks to grants to the American Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum of Natural History, the Florida Museum of Natural History, the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology, the San Diego Museum of Natural History, and the Yale Peabody Museum, this support has improved to access to material that each of the authors of this letter has used in our research. These grants has also supported the first curatorial training for some of us (96849), they have been used to upgrade storage of material we have collected (138662), they have supported development of Specify and HerpNet which we use in our daily research lives (0132303), and they have been used to leverage institutional funding for collections management and space renovation at our home institutions (846697).

In summary, we urge you to continue prioritizing the CSBR and other infrastructural programs that provide funding for repositories. This is because cutting edge scientific research in vertebrate paleontology, where the United States is one of the world’s leaders in this field, is impossible without them. Thank you.

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